Roleplaying Game

A Star is Born

Dorothy was awakened by a thudding sound on the aluminum roof of her trailer. It was a pattering like rain, which would have been unusual enough in Searchlight, but more viscous, as though bowls of thick soup had been tossed from the sky only to ooze down the windows and back up in the drainage pipes.

The streetlights cast a burnt-orange glow on her bedroom walls. Dori sat up and pinched the inner corners of her eyes. Long, tangled strands of hair clung to her temples and cheeks. It was as she sat there blinking that Dori realized the lights were not orange… they simply shown through a fluid the color of iodine.

She walked barefoot to the window, unlatched and pulled it open. A warm breeze came through the trembling screen. Thump-thump-thump-thud… The smell wasn’t fresh like a thunderstorm. It was heavy and organic, a slaughter-house scent that increased as a meaty clot of tissue splattered her windowsill. She touched the wire mesh and her fingers came away red.

It was blood.

Fearless and in awe, Dori left the trailer in her nightgown and ventured onto the narrow road, which was sharp and hurt her feet. She made for a disturbing sight, that young blonde girl covered in gore, her cheeks smeared with finger marks from where she’d wiped at her eyes. She walked until she came to a magnificent beast laboring and rising from the dirt near his mistress’s black skirts. It was a creature of blood and sinew and bone, unlike anything she had seen or imagined. Hidden in the shadows, Dori arched her neck to look at it and smiled. Blood ran into the spaces between her teeth and tasted of iron and salt.